IDESiGN_Teaching Design Thinking

To enable children to learn in an inquiring, active, natural way, learning experiences, products and services should reflect educational principles, a learning model, and instructional strategies based on design thinking.

Guidelines for Developing Learning Experiences
Educational content should be structured to maximize natural learning using the following guidelines:


1.	Motivating Situation: Every project should begin from a context interesting to the student, one they would like to understand, know about or participate in.
2.	Clear goals: There should always be clear and worthwhile goals, preferably of the child's choosing, to motivate and energize their effort.
3.	Opportunities to fail: Goal oriented activities should allow the student to make mistakes or choose something having a bad consequence that they can understand and learn from.
4.	Consequences of failure: The consequences of a mistake or bad choice should be illustrated or dramatized when it occurs. Why a response is wrong and how it could be improved or corrected should always be explained.
5.	Corrective options: The student should have choices of what to do to address their mistake: Try it over again to better understand their options and what they could do. Get more information or ask questions to learn more about the situation. Get advice, coaching or help to learn why they are going wrong and how to fix it. Learn what others did to see they did to correctly solve the problem.
6.	Strategic instruction: At appropriate moments additional information should be introduced using teaching strategies such as scaffolding, referencing, comparing, explaining, demonstrating, providing information just when it is needed or incidental to anactivity, and reminding them of important aspects of their experiences.
7.	Rewards: Reward success and encourage further learning by offering further challenges that encourage the child to apply what they have learned at a level appropriate to their achievement.
8.	Memory reinforcement: To reinforce learning and recall, success and failure should be marked by images, labels or objects that are memorable and meaningful to the child. Where possible these images should be recalled during evaluation and reflection and related to future activities.

Following and consistently implementing these guidelines will assure that learning actually occurs and is measurable while also assuring that learning experiences will be highly interactive, engaging and responsive to the students needs.

Developing Sessions and Activities
Each learning experience should have specific educational objectives and consist of several activities and their evaluation to determine if the educational objective(s) of the session have been realized.
Where physical objects are provided to support a learning experience they should be thoughtfully selected, related to appropriate instructional strategies, student abilities, interests, and assessment methods to assure that educational objectives are attained.
Online learning experiences should provide the same or similar activities as offline activities and use similar presentations and aides so that children can learn the same thing using either approach.

Several steps in the development of a learning experience are suggested, each with its own descriptive requirements and format.

Step 1:	Identify the age and level of student and the subject area of the session
Step 2:	State the educational objective for the session or activity
Step 3:	Identify students and teachers and their level of involvement
Step 4:	Decide the focus of the experience within an overall curriculum plan
Step 5:	Give the activity or session a descriptive name
Step 6:	Conceive and describe the focus of the session and its mode of delivery
Step 7:	Conceive and describe the activities the child will undertake
Step 8:	Conceive and describe the expected behaviors and outcomes
Step 9:	Identify the evaluation technique to be used.

Steps 1-5 specify the session or activity and how it fits into a larger curriculum.

For example:

	Age range, curriculum level and subjecl: (ex. 3-4 Year Olds: Level 1, English)
	Activity Number and Descriptive Name: (ex. 1 -Learning the Symbols and Letter Forms For English Sounds
	Involvement: (ex. English teacher -interactive presentation)
	Educational Objective: The child learns that language is made up of symbols representing sounds; there are some sounds that have no symbols in the English alphabet but may have special symbols; and that symbols have an alphabetical order and may vary in their style.

Specifying An Activity For Development
Every activity should be described as a basis for discussion, modification and approval prior to implementing it.
A useful format in which to specify a session for development is as follows:
Add steps 6-9 to the previous specification:

	Mode and Motivating Situation: ex. OnLine: Letters appear randomly from a character's mouth followed by the English language sounds associated with them. Offline: sound is made by audio toy when a letter is pressed. Or teacher points to letter and voices sound.
	Activities: ex. The child is then asked to select the letter that goes with the sound they hear. Some sounds may not be spoken sounds and some may not have letters in the English alphabet, letting the child know they are not used in English. The order of the alphabet can then be arranged in the proper sequence as their sounds are voiced, each time in a different letterform to indicate that letters do not always look the same. Children can then be asked to put letters that have been scrambled in alphabetic order, saying the sound of the letter as they do so.
	Expected Behavior: ex.The voicing of letters may be repeated, the alphabet drill repeated, or the alphabet rescrambled as often as desirable.)
	Evaluation: ex. Correct matches and placements. Number of alphabet cycles.

Developing Activities and Teaching Technique
Once an activity description is approved for development the following steps can be followed to describe how the session will be taught.

Step 10:	Develop an outline script with illustrative sketches or storyboards to help you think through the activities in the session.
Step 11:	Check the script against curriculum targets, availability of resources and time.
Step 12:	Develop and refine the lesson plan.
Step 13:	Test the activity with a child, parent and teacher.
Step 14:	Make whatever improvements are indicated.
Step 15:	Determine how you will determine success and what was actually learned.
Step 16:	Teach and evaluate the session. (See sections on Instructional strategies and Assessing What is learned.)